Energy books

It was they who afterward held
the outpost lines in Flanders. Some of them were still alive on March
21, 1918, when they were surrounded by a sea of Germans and fought
until the last, in isolated redoubts north and south of St.-Quentin.
Two of them are still alive, those between whom I sat at dinner that
night, and who escaped many close calls of death before the armistice.
Of the others who charged one another with wooden benches, their
laughter ringing out, some were blown to bits, and some were buried
alive, and some were blinded and gassed, and some went "missing" for
evermore.


XVIII

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was
boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming
boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal
interests of life and from the activities of brain-work; an
intolerable, abominable boredom, sapping the will-power, the moral
code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed no escape
except by death, no relief except by vice, no probable or possible
change in its dreary routine.


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